Dealing with accounting if you’re not an accountant

Chances are, if you have a passion for accounting, you’re a CPA. For most other business owners, accounting issues, along with other issues that tend to become intertwined with accounting (i.e. most of them) like regulatory compliance, licensing, and payroll issues get handled one of a few ways:

Ignore it – not a really smart option. Especially payroll issues, but failure to deal with ANY accounting and tax compliance issues can get you into serious trouble and unplanned expense.

Outsource it and forget it – Retaining a CPA is a must for any business. A common way of dealing with accounting issues is to turn them all over to an outside CPA firm and just let them tell you what to do when. This approach lets you sleep at night, and better CPA firms will provide advice that keeps you on track and in control of your business. But just as staying in good health requires some self-awareness of how your body works, keeping in control of your business requires some basic understanding of finance. So outsourcing it and then trying to forget it doesn’t really work. You need to be involved.

Bridge the gap between your bookkeeping and your business – The right approach is to learn how your financial statements affect your business – and vice-versa. The more you understand the relationships, the better your CPA can advise you. This works the other way around, by the way. Your CPA doesn’t know as much about your business as you do, and his or her advice tends to be based around tax minimization and other factors that are not specific to your industry, unless you learn what questions to ask.

We can help – over 20 years of business ownership and experience in different industries means we can help you and your CPA speak the same language. Contact us for a free initial consultation.